The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, · Page 7

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vv " - TV. innnniHraimmnitiiurarainiiunniiniminuMimnan t 4 - r x Y J ' t 1 . . f j Bruce , j Hutchison fi-J weekends and jolly evenings in the pub. They want it both ways and, falling between two stools,, watch the Europeans and the Japanese surge ahead of them in the pursuit of wealth, if not of happiness. Somewhere down the road a choice must be made 'in all nations not- necessarily guns or butter, as in wartime, but a reasonable, attainable style of life or a dog-eat-dog struggle in which all the dogs win finally be eaten, along with the planet Of course, that choice will not be made easily, clearly or soon. It will vary, in time, method and wisdom, from nation to nation, if it can be made voluntarily at all, and not enforced by hunger, plague or other catastrophe. In the meantime most of the politicians in the democracies pretend mat the choice can be avoided, that all men can have unlimited material wealth and unlimited happiness, too, if only the right government is elected, the right legislation passed and the economic machine perfected. . This age-old assumption has been shattered, within the last five years, by the discovery that our planet does not contain the necessary ingredients and already Is being ravaged, and poisoned, by our excessive demands upon a finite, fragile and totally interdependent structure. Nevertheless, the promise of ever-increasing affluence, and ever-decreasing labor in its production, is still the grand talisman, fetish and big lie of politics under elected or non-elected government everywhere. And any man wno dares to mention the contrary facts, now measurable and ra- OF Rincb "I'm sorry Mr. Brenton, that's not the sort of lie ym' re looking for." ... ... .. By PAUL WHITELAW (Journal Quebec Bureau) MONTREAL It's a well-worn , cliche that everyone loses during a strike. However, even in this city where many people have be-s come cynical and hardened by a succession of labor troubles the cost of the recent eiglnV week wildcat longshoremen's strike is still horrifying. In absolute dollar terms, the walkout ended last week by special federal legislation has cost businessmen and union .members over $100 million., , Loss of revenue to trucking . companies, tugboat operators, ships chandlers, railroads and other industries which serve Canada's largest port is estimated at more than $50 million. Another $20 million was lost by importers, according to estimates by the Canadian Importers Association. - Export Y pidly closing in. on us, is. usu- . ally denounced as an opponent of progress, a black reactionary or, at best, a nut Britain looks particularly interesting at the moment because there .-.the conflicting forces of economics and human nature .come to. sharp, focus and compel an early choice. So also is Japan, because it has already chosen "economics at the cost of other1 values, including a livable environment By the size of their cramped geography and lack of raw resources these great . island states present two' vivid microcosms of mankind's . universal dilemma a preview, so to speak, of the future confronting us all at some point With full respect for the infallible Economist, a layman - may suspect in his ignorance that such "problems are not : mainly economic and will not The Ottawa Journal $100 million ,now, more later ''! Montreal's eight-week dock strike costs mount if .Thursday, July 13, 1972 'H 2?ft LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland Debris Utters Londonderry street Wednesday after 200-pound gelignite bomb exploded in the city centre wrecking dozens of shops and offices. The explosion occurred THE NATION BiiuimiiiniiiiHHimiiiniiiiiuiiniiiinnmnMiiiiBiumiinnniMr A few minutes after five o'clock, in a conference room of the East Block, Prime Minister Trudeau looked up from the 66-page report that he had been studying for the past two hours, stared at the 17 men in front ' of him, and asked, "What now?" The obvious answer was in the report The Great Plains Project was asking the federal government for $1 million over the next two years to continue its investigation of such adventurous proposals as a giant . resource-carrying aircraft powertd by 12 jet engines, fish farming on the prairies and year-round "vege-table factories" in the Arctic with controlled environments. But the prime minister wasn't asking about dollars or , technical data. Presumably the Great Plains Project will get them money it needs.. Trudeau was inviting the group to think aloud for a few minutes about its future role in relation to government and industry, and to Canadian society as a whole. , y This part of the discussion extended the two-hour session for an unscheduled 40 minutes, and it didn't produce any clear answers. For the past two years, the Great Plains Project has been freewheeling creatively through unexplored territories between the neighboring but, isolated worlds of govern 7 Extraordinarily productive In this perspective, the two ready spent an estimated years since the prime min- $500,000 of its own money to ister asked Atrill to form the elaborate the basic design of group seemalmrldylllcrthe-giant aircraft dreamed up And as the session on last - by one of Atrill's groups to fly Tuesday revealed to Trudeau and four of his ministers Macdonald (Energy), Jamie-son (Transport), Lang (Justice) and Gillespie (Science and Technology) the period has also been extraordinarly productive for government and industry. .')' Atrill's mandate from the " prime minister was simply to pull together some of the best brains in the country to think big about northern development There was only one restriction: projects dreamed up by the group would have to be feasible in terms of existing technology. The federal government promised, in this initial phase, only to cover the group's operating expenses. These have amounted to about $80,000 at this stage.. On Tuesday, the cabinet received its money's worth from Atrill and his' colleagues. Eight specific projects were outlined dealing with under-ground water resources on the prairies, commercial fish farming on the prairies, plant culture in controlled environments in the north, increased beef production, new mining methods, new petrochemical industries, northern shipping and resource-carrying air- craft. But the group's impact has actually been far more substantial than its report to cabinet indicated. The Boeing company in Seattle has al- THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH' A challenge to scientific 'revolutionaries' By Peter Desbarats ment large corporations and ; universities. In the process it has tapped the talents and energies of several hundred brilliant Canadians, upset conventional thinking in government departs and corporate boardrooms and just possibly set this country, on several new paths of development which will affect millions of people . in the next few decades..." ' .,' . . But the time has already arrived when the scientific "revolutionaries' of the Great Plains Project are being forced to consider the institutional aspects of their own existence. It is rapidly becoming impossible for three Torontonians economist Verne Atrill, lawyer Richard Rohmer and retired Imperial Oil executive, Gordon Purdy to keep the whole organization In their beads and in a small suite of offices in a federal building in downtown Toronto. ' Full-time experts in various technical fields, will have to be hired in the near future. More conferences and seminars wiU have to be sponsored in various parts of the country. The organization of the group itself will have to be overhauled and difficult questions , about political, corporate and academic conflicts within the group will bavt to be answered. X -. ' eas and other resources from the Arctic. The studies so far indicate that such an aircraft would be at least competitive with pipelines, which - has caused the oil and pipelines companies to take a keen income only from a highly ef- terest in the Great Plains Project so keen that the Project appears confident of -raising $15,000,000 from private sources for final economic and design studies of the aircraft Other aspects of the Project's work have produced ideas which are now being explored, at a cost of millions, by at least one multi-national corporation which has been an executive on one of the Project teams. So far, the Project has encouraged this kind of activity by private enterprise. All this has been possible because Atrill and his colleagues, with the prime 'minister's Interest and prestige to back them, have been able to move through government office and corporate boardroom, as if they were inventing some new kind of game and making up the rules as they went along. Nothing exactly like the Great Plains Project has ever j - existed in Canada. Its biggest challenge now will be to maintain its creative thrust while defining itts immediate concrete objectives and the outlines of its own institutional existence. . , Wednesday "The Glorious Twelfth," the 282nd anniversary of the Battle of Boyne which established Protestant supremacy In Ulster - -(AP-Joornol Wlrechoto) sales were probably more severely hurt, but ho figures are available." More than 30 million bushels of grain -which would have been shipped, through Montreal were diverted to grain . ' A matter oi human values A layman looks at Britain Because it judges human af-' fairs from an economic point of view (in print, anyhow,) and suffers the crushing burden of its own infallibility, the Economist of London is deeply alarmed by the current state of British society. Having examined Britain's sloppy business methods, wildly inflated, prices, sick currency and disappointing government. The Economist concludes that "the biggest obstacle to a change in this country is the one which the politicians can least acknowledge; it is the inertia of the British public." Canadians, who generally admire Britain though know-ing little about it, are not equipped or entitled, like The Economist, to make such harsh judgments especially when Canada's economic management is nothing to boast about these days. After all, Britain occupies a small, crowded island, with minor physical resources, and yet has created one of- the world's finest civilizations. ; Canada is the second largest and, per capita, the richest nation on earth and yet it has not solved even the temporary riddle of inflat'on and unemployment much less the problem of its cultural duality. In the popular sport of deploring Britain's mismanagement it is not for us to hurl the first stone. Besides, the real problems of both nations and, indeed, all the Western nations while differing in detail, is basically the same. As The Economist seems to realize, with somewhat comic horror, it is not' economic but human. Men, being men and not machines or statistics, refuse to obey economic laws and are now paying a high price for their disobedience. They try to have their cake and eat : it, 1 which is impossible but , quite natural to our queer species'. - Thus the British people, for instance, demand a standard of consumption which can ficlent economic apparatus, from brutal competition and hard work, but they also cling to their old and pleasant ways, their lovely countryside,, their leisure, long THE PICK PUNCH m:'lll elevators in other cities. Wait- ing for delayed shipments at other ports kept many ships waiting several days, at a cost of up to $6,000 a day. These losses were repeated to a lesser extent in the ports, of Quebec City and Three Rivers, Que., which were also-strikebound until special legislation was passed in Ottawa last week. . The 3,200 longshoremen in the three ports lost at least $2,500 each in wages, and many would have made more than that because of overtime during" the busy summer shipping season. Now that their illegal walkout has been ended, - about half of the dockers are be solved by -any improve-.-ment in the productive machine of Britain or any other nation. They are not political either, if politics mean only the passage of laws and regulations. . Instead, they are philosoph-. ical, ethical and psychological (you can choose your own ad-' jective) and will be solved, if they can be solved, onlyJy human creatures coming to. terms, at least, with a creaturehood far larger than themselves and a planet far smaller than they used to think. - - -i ; The sudden emergence of that fact is surely the most important event in man's five millennia of civilization; for,' if he fails to master it, civilization will' be remembered later on, if anyone is around to remember, as -a momentary flash, a very brief candle in the endless dark. The also out of work temporarily until business volume increases. .Under a contract ratified by. the men last spring, they . coujd have received job security payments in the event of layoffs. However, this provision was suspended temporarily by the back-to-work legislation until port business returns to normal. . If losses incurred by local business and workers during the last eight weeks are staggering, the possible long term effect of the labor dispute ' along the waterfront may be more disconcerting. At least one major shipping firm has cancelled all scheduled trips by its "vessels to Montreal this year. Other, lines have moved personnel and equipment to the ports of Halifax and Saint John, N.B., and it is uncertain how much-will return. Arnold' Masters of the Mari- - time Employers Association told reporters this week that it will take at least four months to know whether the. port has returned to normal. About 30 per cent of the business done by the port' of Montreal is "discretionary" - a word used by Shippers to de- scribe business that could easily be switched to other cities. The other 70 per cent will likely remain here despite a bleak record of labor trouble in recent years. Even so, a loss of even 10 per cent of the port's business would do away with hundreds of jobs with stevedoring firms and allied services. This fact was recognized during the strike by Premier Robert Bou-rassa and Quebec Labor Minister ...Jean Coumoyer, ' who - both termed the strike a dis- -aster and urged Ottawa to act ' The federal government . also lost heavily during the strike, not only income taxes and other tariff revenue, but that important political commodity in an election year t prestige. ' -Federal Labor Minister Martiji O'Connell insisted' repeatedly that the dispute was a private affair between employer and employees, un-t i 1 ultimately . he had to present back-to-work legislation in the House of Commons. ' In itself, the bill was a farce for it was essentially a law re-- quiring longshoremen to obey a law already on the books. An arbitration board ruled that the walkout was illegal,. . and there are sanctions in the federal Labor Code to handle just such a situation. ' Aside from the money lost; by longshoremen, they also lost any apparent chance of having the contentious con-' tract clauses which sparked the strike resolved. . .;-, Under a contract signed earlier this year, the men agreed to allow the traditional system of having 17-man gangs load and unload ships broken up, in return for 36 weeks annual guaranteed em-'--ployment and a generous pension scheme. Instead, the men agreed to be assigned to loading oper-L: ations by a computer in gangs of varying size eliminating cases where only five or six men in a 17-man gang were . actually, needed. - - .T-. However, the rank-and-file -rebelled when the stevedoring ' companies tried to introduce the new system. In the past, : the unneeded men on- the -gangs had - been able to "spell" each other off taking what amounted to regular four and five day paid vacations. ' ; Longest session MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (UPI) -The Democrats set a record . early today for the longest national political convention session. It lasted more than II hours. '" The second session of the convention adjourned at 6.20 a.m. -EDT, and before he gaveled the marathon to a close, chairman Lawrence - O'Brien announced . the record and told the delegates he had "never seen anything like it." Choice. U -r The smooth taste of quality that is unmistakably Seagram's. Seagram's FIVE STAR Canada's largest-selling rye whisky. Blended and bottled by Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Ltd., Waterloo, Ont.